Reflections on American politics from one who thinks the republic needs constant attention.

Tuesday, January 1, 2019

Policy Making: Madness Disguised

Policy Making: Madness Disguised

Peter Schultz

In an
excellent biography of Robert Strange McNamara entitled Promise and Power there occurs the following assessment of McNamara
by one of his contemporaries at a time when McNamara seemed to some to be on
the verge of mental breakdown as the Vietnam War was degenerating into mindless
and ineffective killing and McNamara knew it.

“Everything
he believed in was being knocked on its ass in Vietnam. Here was a guy who
really believed that the truth is what you got out of the machine when you
asked for it. You know, what would we do about x? – here comes the answer, the
organizational truth.” [p. 426]

Now this is
an excellent characterization of Robert McNamara and how he thought, both in
and out of the political arena. But it seems fair to say that it is also a
pretty good description of how a good many, even most Americans have come to
think politically. We ask: What are our problems? Then we ask: What are the
solutions to those problems? The implication being that solving political
problems is a lot like or exactly like solving math problems. All we need do is
to find the right formula and we will be able to solve our problems.

Hence, in
Vietnam, those in charge looked for the formula, the right mixture of, say,
search and destroy missions, Vietnamization, pacification, assassinations, and
bombing that would lead to victory. And of course people like Robert McNamara
looked like the most likely source of what would be the successful solution to
the problem of Vietnam. After all, he had worked apparent wonders at the Ford
Motor Company before he became the secretary of defense for Kennedy. But it
didn’t work out that way and the longer McNamara dealt with Vietnam, the worse
the situation seemed to become. That is, more and more civilians were killed,
more and more American and Vietnamese soldiers were killed, and yet the war
went on and on and on until, finally, the United States pulled out after having
obtained, as the official line had it, “peace with honor.” Of course, it got
neither peace nor honor. All it got was the return of is prisoners of war,
while the Vietnamese once again united their country against the wishes of a
powerful enemy seeking to subjugate them.

So what are
we to make of this? If policy making does not work, if it leads more often to
failure than success, what are we to replace it with? And that framework has so
consumed our thinking about politics that it is difficult to think of
alternatives. But let me try anyway.

Once upon a
time, it was thought that there were certain fundamental political questions
such as what is justice? What is the most appropriate end of politics? Is it
liberty, prosperity, security, or national greatness? Or more recently, have we
created a military-industrial complex, as President Eisenhower argued? How
should ambition and the ambitious be dealt with? How can we prevent an
oligarchy from forming and controlling our politics and society? What is a just
war?

The fact
that we don’t spend much time considering such questions does not mean that
they aren’t important or relevant. One cannot help but suspect that it was the
pursuit of national greatness that led to the fiasco in Vietnam, the one in
Iraq, and the continuing one in Afghanistan. Perhaps if we questioned whether
we should pursue national greatness, our politics would not be as messed up as
it is. Has the pursuit of national greatness led to the creation of that
military-industrial complex Ike warned us about? Did the failure to ask,
seriously ask whether the Vietnam War was a just war contribute to its outcome?
For if it weren’t just, then eventually that fact would make itself known,
thereby contributing to the opposition that arose the longer the war went on
and that many say caused US defeat in that war. Humans have a difficult time
participating in injustice, especially when the injustice involves large scale
killing, torture, and oppression.

In other
words, we ignore some political questions at our own peril. Ambition and the
ambitious must be dealt with by any political order, as should be crystal clear
these days with Donald Trump as president, if it wasn’t already clear when LBJ,
Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, or George W. Bush was president. Ambition may be,
as Alexander Hamilton wrote, “the ruling passion of the noblest minds” – or not!
And the cost of ignoring certain political questions should be clear as we
stumble from one failed military engagement, one fruitless war to another. To
treat war-making as McNamara did in Vietnam and as our politicians have done in
Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, as a problem to be solved by the correct
formula, without considering the status of war-making as a political activity
or phenomenon, is to invite failure after failure. And all the glorification of
our military will do nothing to avoid these failures. If not one soldier
fighting in Vietnam had been dishonored – as some surely were – that war would
still have been unjust and, hence, unsustainable. For that was what led to that
war’s loss of legitimacy, that it was unjust, that it was inhumane, that it was
a fool’s errand.

Robert
McNamara’s biography is a good one to study because he was so eminently
American. That he finished his stint in the Defense Department near a mental
breakdown should be taken as a sign that how he did politics, which is largely
how most Americans think of doing politics, is a form of or leads to madness.